


Little Lies

by LookIntoMyTelescope



Category: Mean Girls - Richmond/Benjamin/Fey
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Austistic Cady Heron, Autistic Character, Bisexual Female Character, Closeted Character, F/F, F/M, It's mean girls! But in 1988!, Lesbian Character, Light Angst, Loosely Based On Musical Canon, M/M, Multi, Period Typical Bigotry, Period-Typical Homophobia, Trans Male Character, like as in transphobia, slowburn, trans damian hubbard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24750298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookIntoMyTelescope/pseuds/LookIntoMyTelescope
Summary: So this is Mean Girls, but set in 1988, because I'm so sick of people comparing Mean Girls and Heathers as coming of age comedies centered around teen girls, because the plots are SO DIFFERENT!!Based on the plot of the musical, but I am going to deviate in spots because Tina Fey doesn't get rights.Title comes from the song by Fleetwood Mac
Relationships: Cady Heron/Aaron Samuels, Cady Heron/Gretchen Wieners, Janis Sarkisian/Karen Smith, Regina George/Cady Heron (One Sided), Regina George/Shane Oman
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11





	Little Lies

Cady Heron wasn’t a homeschooled freak. Was she well adjusted? Absolutely not. You can’t grow up only talking to animals and adults and be “normal”. But she wasn’t some religious zealot or savant or a member of a cult, so she already had a leg up there. She knew people were basically animals and teenagers were just younger people. So maybe, Cady could figure out this whole “socialization” thing that her mom was completely worried about.

North Shore High School was unfairly big, it had three levels, and the football stadium in the back was bigger than the entire base camp Cady grew up in. To make matters worse, the place was crawling with teenagers, none of them looking completely lost, save for Cady. She took a deep breath, readjusted her denim jacket, and closed the car door behind her.

“Goodbye Binti, have a good day! Make good choices!” Her dad’s voice trailed off as he drove away. Cady steeled herself and walked up to a girl with the biggest hair she’d ever seen, who was dressed in an obnoxiously colorful pinstripe shirt, smoking a cigarette. Cady waved.

“Hi, I was wondering if you could-”

“-Who said you could talk to me?” The girl rolled her eyes, ashing her cigarette.

Cady could feel her face heat up. That wasn’t super nice.

“Oh, sorry.” She managed to mutter out, before turning around, in a desperate attempt to save herself from embarrassment already blooming in her chest. She bounded up the steps to the main entrance, already lost. It only got worse when she was inside, the fluorescent lighting made everything look super washed out, and there were even more teenagers cluttering up the hallway. She scooted past a group of boys in letterman jackets, accidentally brushing against one of them. He whipped around, looking down at Cady. He looked super annoyed, and he was at least half a foot taller. Cady knew what happened to quarry when they got in a predator’s way. They got eaten.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“Watch where you’re going next time, nerd.” He spat, sizing up Cady before turning back around to his friends. Cady quickly turned tail and sped away in the direction of where she thought the office would be, only to get turned around when a girl with hair taller than a giraffe bodychecked her to the ground. High school was going to be more like the savannah than Cady thought.

Cady continued until she ended up in a library, clearly the opposite of where she wanted to be. She spotted a group of blue polo wearing boys congregated around a table. She steeled herself, already dreading some level of unkindness from them. She approached the table.

“Hi, I’m Cady, does anyone know where I can find Principal Duvall’s office?” Cady asked sheepishly, to a group of stunned teenage boys. None of them spoke, they just looked around at each other, absolutely bewildered that Cady was talking to them for some reason. One of them, a lanky boy wearing a puffy vest over his polo, looked shocked but spoke up.

“It’s by the front doors, to the right, you can’t miss it.” He gained his composure halfway through giving directions, yet he still looked at Cady like he was a mongoose, and she was a particularly appealing snake. Cady instinctively shrank into her denim jacket as she scurried off in the opposite direction, just in time for the first bell to sound. What did that mean? Was she late? She picked up the pace, stepping through a door labeled “Principal’s Office” just in time for another bell to ring. 

Principal Duvall looked incredibly tired, but so did most American adults Cady had met in the past three days.   
“You must be Caddy Her-on, it’s nice to meet you, I’m Mr. Duvall.” Mr. Duvall completely butchered Cady’s name, but Cady didn’t have the nerve to correct him. Cady instead offered a polite smile.

“Nice to meet you too, Mr. Duvall.”

Luckily, Cady didn’t have to ask for directions again, Mr. Duvall escorted her to her homeroom class, written on her schedule as  **_00-Homeroom- Sharon Norbury_ ** . 

The pair entered the classroom to see it in almost complete disarray, and to Cady’s horror, full of teenagers. An older woman sat in the front of the classroom, her glasses on her desk, her head in her hands. Mr. Duvall frowned at the commotion in front of him. He reached for the shiny whistle hanging around his neck and blew it. The piercing sound of the whistle mixed with the array of conversations quickly ending made Cady’s head spin. The classroom quickly quieted down. Mr. Duvall cleared his throat, and he smiled a wide, almost painfully obvious grimace.

“Thank you. We have a new student joining us this year, all the way from Kansas-”

“-Kenya-” Cady corrected under her breath. Mr. Duvall turned to her, his eyes wide in clear surprise.

“My apologies,  _ Kenya _ . Everybody welcome Caddy,” Mr. Duvall gestured to Cady.

“It’s actually Cady,” Cady interjected. Mr. Duvall shook his head.

“Cady, I am very sorry. I’m not very good with these  _ modern  _ names. Back in my day, your name was Joseph or Nancy, that was it. Now I have a nephew named Xavier, why?” Mr. Duvall asked. Cady didn’t really have an answer for him, but then again, maybe he was asking himself the question, she didn’t really know.

“Maybe you should introduce yourself,” Mr. Duvall stepped aside, removing the last line of defense between Cady and the Teenagers. Cady steeled herself. She could do this. She could make a friend, these teens already had so many friends, what was one more? They probably just wanted to fit in and reject the new kid, like how a troop of baboons treated an outsider. That was at least a little comforting.

“Hi, I’m Cady! I’m from-”

“Nobody cares!” Rudely interrupted one of those boys in the letterman jacket.

“Take your top off!” Shouted another boy. He had a sweatshirt tied around his shoulders, and he wore a smirk on his face that made Cady’s stomach turn. Luckily, it slipped off of his face to form a sneer when the girl sitting in front of him slammed her hand down on his inappropriately small desk, glaring at him. Cady didn’t have time to hear what the girl had said to that rude boy before she heard a voice behind her. She turned to come face to face with the older woman from before, glasses now carefully perched on her face.

“Hi, Cady, I’m Ms. Norbury, I’m your homeroom teacher. I see that I also have you for AP Calculus, you must’ve had excellent teachers at your old school!” She praised. Cady grinned.

“Uh, no, actually. I was homeschooled.”

Ms. Norbury’s gentle smile grew a little more forced, not that Cady particularly noticed.

“Homeschooled. That’s a fun way to steal money from my union.” Norbury half-spat. Cady hadn’t realized that being homeschooled was that bad.

“My parents are both biologists, and we’ve been living in Kenya, but no, I  _ love  _ calculus!” Cady beamed. Ms. Norbury’s shoulders relaxed, just a little bit.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me, and I’ve been married twice” Norbury laughed, though she herself looked pretty sad. She continued.

“So do you think you can follow the schedule? It can be a little jarring for a homeschooled student, you’re going to be moving from class to class-”

The bell from before cut her off, and all the teenagers emptied into the hall. Cady looked at her schedule. Her next class was: 

**_01- American Literature- Curtis Bach_ **

“Good morning class, this is American Literature, and my name is Mr. Bach.”

Bach sounded almost robotic, and he looked almost like a grown-up version of that boy that had harassed Cady in homeroom. Cady didn’t like him already. Cady moved to sit in the only available desk in the front row of the class.

“You don’t wanna sit there, Dawn Schweitzer saves that seat for her boyfriend.”

Cady looked up to meet the eye of one of the weirdest girls she’d ever seen. Her hair was much shorter than other girls, and it was strangely colored, with blonde peeking out by her temples, even though her hair was otherwise dark. She also wore a leather jacket, but it was painted all over in designs that Cady didn’t have time to process. Cady turned to the other seat next to hers. The girl sitting there looked heavily annoyed. It was the girl who was smoking outside the building this morning.

“Oh shit, not you again, jungle freak” Dawn spat, her heavily made-up eyes rolling already.

Cady smiled hesitantly.

“Can’t I just sit here today? Please?” Cady pleaded. Dawn roared out a laugh.

“Not unless you’re gonna tickle my back, bitch.” She spat.

**_02- French 102- Zurin Bouchard_ **

“ Bienvenue en français intermédiaire, aujourd'hui nous choisirons nos noms pour la classe. Cady, comme tu j’appelle?” Madame Bouchard asked, gesturing towards Cady. Cady already knew a great deal of French, due to contact with some researchers from the area that came to study some of the Maasai tribes that Cady lived near. She raised her hand.

“J’mappelle Cady!” She announced. Madame Bouchard shook her head.

“Incorrect.”

Cady must’ve looked bewildered, how could her name not be her name?

“You have to pick your French name.”

Cady turned around in her desk to face the girl from before, the one who had warned her about Dawn, the very  _ interesting  _ looking girl.

“But most French people just call me Cady?” Cady questioned aloud. The girl laughed, definitely amused.

“Just say Marie,” The girl shrugged. 

“Marie?” Cady half-questioned, half-answered. Madame Bouchard seemed satisfied with that, repeating back Cady’s French name in her excessively thick French accent. She had moved on to the girl behind her, who picked the name “Janice”, then to the person behind her, who had cycled through names like “Chanel”, “Fantine”, and “Bernadette” before settling on the name “Gavroche”. Cady had turned around in her desk to talk to “Janice”, but found herself looking at the back of her jacket, which heavily featured a pink outline of a triangle with block lettering reading 

**Silence = Death** . Cady didn’t really know what that meant, but she couldn’t ask, not when “Janice” was turned around talking to “Gavroche”.

**_03- Health & Human Sexuality- Myles Carr_ **

“Welcome to Health and Human Sex-iality. This fall, we’ll be doing the state-required unit on Abstinence, and in the spring, we’ll do condoms and nutrition.”

Cady only heard the end of his introduction, before she got up to go to the restroom. A short girl that sat in front of her stood up suddenly, spinning around to point at Cady

“No fair! She’s totally leaving!” 

Coach Carr looked up and stalked up to Cady.

“Where do you think you’re going, hotshot?” He stared Cady down, but Cady didn’t cower. She didn’t exactly get why she was called out.

“I- I have to urinate.”

The whole class burst out into laughter, minus of course “Janice” and “Gavroche”, though they both bit back a snicker.

“No way, Jose-”

“-It’s Cady-.”

“-You can go during lunch,” Coach Carr finished.

Cady sunk into her seat, trying to drown out all the mocking laughter from her classmates. She didn’t get it, why was everyone so mean? Was it so hard to be kind to someone? Why did none of the adults step in? Why did they treat her like they couldn’t trust her? Cady really didn’t get it, and when she stepped into the Ladies’ restroom, she decided that she was going to stay there. Who would she sit with, anyway? 

It didn’t matter, she wasn’t cowering away, she was regrouping. She would sulk and eat her sandwich in the restroom stall, and tomorrow, she would set out, and find some friends, and not sit in the bathroom to eat her lunch. But first things first, she needed to lick her wounds.

She heard a loud coughing laugh from the stall next to her. A girl came out of the stall, clutching some kind of hand-rolled cigarette, coughing out smoke. She looked at Cady over the rim of her round sunglasses, clearly sizing her up. She looked away.

“Weirdo,” reverberated around the empty bathroom. Cady crept into her stall and pulled out her sandwich. This was not going to be a good day.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! I hope you enjoyed! Kudos and Comments fuel me to keep going. I will try to post whenever I can, but expect like 3-7 days between chapters. If you wanna ask me questions about the AU (like headcanons for characters, picrew avatars I made, etc.) feel free to harass me on Tumblr @nick-carraways-side-hoe. Have A Good Day!


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